I have no lesson plan. What shall I do? Part II.

'Bring your English, and we'll build on it together.' This is how the Dogme teaching method works.
In the second part of my article I'd like to focus on other ways to conduct an English conversation lesson. I personally like these activities very much and can strongly recommend them, because they really work.

Here we go...

1. Magic match box or make something out of nothing (or next to nothing!)

Find a small container or a matchbox and put a small object into it. It can be a coin, a leaf, a grain of rice, a feather, a seashell, a lottery ticket, an aspirin or a mirror inside. Pass it round the class. Everyone looks inside without showing anyone else and writes the first thing that comes to their mind or they associate the object with.
Next you ask them to mingle and find out what others have written on the slips of paper or Post-it notes.
Ask them to group themselves according to their reactions. Let them explain why they have grouped in this way.



2. Running dictation

It's a form of English dictation, but with lots of fun. You divide the class into 2 groups, find an interesting text, stick it on the board or the wall, each team selects a scretary in their group who will be writing. The aim of each team is to come to the wall, memorise as much of the text or words as possible, come back to the secretary and tell all they remember. The secretary has to write. When the time is over, you compare the texts. The winner is the team that has most identical collocations or the most identical text.
The variation of this game see here.

3. Graffiti

For this game pupils will need sheets of paper. You may divide the class into groups too. You invite one person from the class to answer your question. It can be the question like What did you enjoy eating or drinkin over the past 24 hours?  While this pupil is speaking, the rest have to draw what they understand from the conversatin.
Next they work in their groups, they ask some person the same question and draw his or her answers.
Next each group works together to make sentences from their notes.
When they have finished, you ask them to pass their sheet to another group, they have to study the sheet and say who the answers belong to.

You can surely transform this task of graffiti and organise the lesson a bit differently:
* It can be a drawing dictation, you read the words or clusters of words and your pupils draw what they have heard. The illustrations have to be schematic to save the time.
*Students can listen to the song and draw what they understood from the song.
* They can listen to a story or a fairy tale and draw what they understood, liked, disliked.
*You can use the graffiti task as a summary of a topic. On the board your students may write, draw everything they remembered from the unit or yesterday's lesson.
I invited once a special guest to my lesson and pupils were asking her questions. At the end of the  lesson they made a present for our guest in the form of a graffiti on the board. They drew a lot from what we spoke about at that lesson and of what she told them about herself.

I hope that the suggested activities above were useful for you and you would like to include them into your English lesson plan. The first part of the post you can read here.

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